Monday, June 18, 2012

A formula is a language of elements and symbols, chosen to
produce a governable result.Although
there are areas of similarity between formula and recipe, including an outcome,
you could say without too many accusations of reductionism that recipe, if followed,
will produce corn bread.Formula, if it
is followed, will lead you to the solution of a problem.

Both terms have application to story.

You write a story to solve an inchoate problem that wants to
be articulated, addressed, then brought to some settlement. Within the context
of story, each term—formula and recipe--gets something of a bad rap.Boy plus girl plus cute meeting is a recipe for
many of the early Hollywood comedy romances that were themselves ingredients
used to great success by that paradigm of novelists, Jane Austen.A story, whether filmed, dramatized, or
printed, that delivers an outcome with no surprises or reversals or, as your
new publisher choses to call the trope, turns, is said to be predictable or
formulaic.Predictability in fiction has
become the literary equivalent of immigration among politicians, suspect and
controversial due to the belief that the audience wants to have predictability
to boo and hiss the way they once booed and hissed the villain in the
melodrama.

Your association with formula is not so different from many
aspiring writers; you studied the various genera, identifying the implicit
promises each offered the reader.In
some cases, during the heyday of the massmarket paperback explosion, when there
were such giants as Bantam and Dell and New American Library, Popular Library,
Lion, Gold Medal, Pocket Books, and at least a dozen more, you could actually
write to such a publisher for their genre guidelines.

Through your undergraduate years, you were an avid reader of
science fiction to the point where you had a plausible enough feel for its
formulae.Your true love was the
mystery, however, but one serious problem stood in your way before you could make
your way down its mean streets.

You were unable to have one of your characters kill another
one of your characters.This was not
because of your pacifist nature, because you had no such nature.You were unable to convince yourself a
character had sufficient motive to kill another.How many years did you need to come up with a
motive you could believe?And when you
had the motive—fear of a closely guarded secret being revealed—how many novels
could you do without repeating yourself?

Which brings you back to the problem you never solved to
your satisfaction:Formula meant to you
a set of conditions you could use ad infinitum to produce story.There went a few more years of frustration
and crumpled sheets of early draft manuscript paper.

Whether the story is set within a genre that is fraught with
obligations to the audience or is of a more contemplative, shall we say
literary, approach, it has as an absolute requirement the need for characters the
reader will care about.

When you make this observation before a larger group,
someone in the audience is sure to ask, “How do I make readers care about my
characters?”

At one point, during a presentation, one of the first
questions in the Q and A was that very question.Your reply was certain to have been
grumpy.“It starts with you.You have to care more about them than you do
about getting published.Stop thinking
about getting published and think more about creating worthwhile characters.”

To a growing tide of
foot shuffling and muttering, you went on, perhaps to save the day.“Characters are your tools.You don’t use a ripsaw to cut across the
grain.You don’t use a cheap knife to
dice vegetables.Get yourself a
character with some background—someone who has fears and hopes and blind sides
and one or two questionable moral values. Get yourself a character who has a
weakness for a particular other person or a particular thing that is not
healthy.Get yourself a character or two
who are tired of being losers and now see a chance to make something of
themselves, provided they’re willing to cut a few corners.Get yourself a character who’d rather tend
bar in an Alaska saloon than practice law in Boston. Get yourself
characters--”the glimmer of an idea was coming through. “—get yourself a set of
characters who’ll do things that surprise you, and don’t ask me how to do
that.The way to do that is to stop
telling them what to do and start listening to them, which means you’ve got to
let them talk more, which means you’ve got to ramp and amp, and don’t ask me
what that means.That means they’ve got
to be more confrontational when they talk.”

You’d begun to feel like a circuit-riding preacher on a
Sunday afternoon, unsure where his next chicken dinner invitation was coming
from.You also noticed there were
scattered “yes” and vigorous nods of approval in the group.

You never know how effective those outbursts are or what
results they produce in your audience, although you do want them to get it,
your impatience with them being a mere reflection of your own impatience with
yourself and such technique as you may have.Whatever that is, it is not enough to suit you.

Your frustration comes from the simultaneous wanting of and
recognition of the impossibility of discovering the philosopher’s stone, that
alchemical equivalent of the holy grail, the formula for story.

Aristotle did not compose his Poetics in vain; he dissected story to the point where he
could.The rest is up to you and your
sister and brother writers who would send story rushing out into the streets
like Paul Revere, warning not against the impending arrival of the Red Coats,
but of boredom, of plainness, of niceness.

Formula will take you so far, then, with an enormous heave;
it bucks you off its back, into the air for a brief moment or two.There you are, no longer on your high horse,
rather an immediate martyr to the laws of gravity.

Preface

These are notes, arguments, and attempts to resolve any lingering indecision about works in progress, things I have observed, books and stories I have read, things I wish I had done, and things I wish I had not done. They are in effect the kinds of notes I put in bottles at the beach as a kid, but this time the hoped for reader is the me of the future, browsing here for the energy and vision that got these notes down in the first place.